Princess Cruises Comparison

On this episode, Jared compares his trip to Norway on Princess Cruise Lines to other cruises he has taken in the past.

Transcript

0:00

On this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared shares with us his experience on Princess Cruise Line and compares it to the other cruises he's been on. Welcome to this week's episode of A Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared Dryer, and today we are gonna be talking about Princess Cruise Line and our recent trip to Norway. In this episode, we'll be comparing different cruise lines that we've been on, highlighting what we've liked the best, as well as what we've liked the least, and where we h- may have had some challenges along the way. And if you listen to some of our other episodes, we have compared Disney Cruise Line to Carnival, Holland America, some of the others. But this was our first chance to go on Princess Cruise. But before we dive into that, wanna remind you guys, wherever you're listening to this podcast find that subscribe button. Go ahead and hit, click that so that way you're gonna get this content delivered into your inbox whenever we do publish an episode. They are a little further and fewer between due to work schedules and a lot of things going on in our lives right now, and we are trying to get you guys content as Disney updates things or Universal updates things. So keep in mind that these episodes will continue to be coming to you. But this week we're gonna be talking about cruises. Second, if you guys look at our podcast description down in the links below you guys can find all different things that we support, and you can find ways to support the show there, as well as our Dryer Dose of Disney condo down in Orlando. This is a great place to stay if you wanna go to the Disney or Universal parks, and we highly recommend it. It's gonna be a lot cheaper than the hotels. You do get three bedrooms, two baths. And we are … if you listened to our last episode, I told you we're booked into December. We're now booked through most of December, and we're working into 2027. We look forward to hosting you down there, but go ahead and check that out in the podcast description below But today we're here to talk about Princess Cruises. So we wanna tell you about our most recent cruise that we went on, which was we took the Sky Princess out of Southampton. So we flew to London. Fortunately, we had a direct flight from New Orleans to London. And though it's a long flight, and, we didn't enjoy it either way, 'cause we did sit in the back in, in coach I can say it's totally worth it to only have, seven to nine hours on the flight and to have a direct flight where we didn't have to connect or worry about bags or anything like that. And getting around London was not very difficult at all. In fact we used the Tube, we used the systems there to go to Waterloo, and then at Waterloo that's where our hotel was the first night we stayed. We went around, we saw Big Ben, we saw Buckingham Palace. We saw a lot of the cool sights to see there in London. And then the next day, we took the train from Waterloo Station down to Southampton. Now, I will say we ran into a little bit of a hiccup there due to the fact that our train that we had booked and scheduled got canceled. So we were able to talk to somebody at a ticket counter, and they said,"Hey, hop on this other train right now," which was getting ready to leave. They said, "You'll go half the way, and then you'll just switch trains there, and that'll take you the rest of the way." And so we did that, and it was a little chaotic, but we managed to make it work. So I'll tell you this. Arriving, though, from the train station at Southampton was not our best experience. We thought we'd be able to secure a Bolt, which is their equivalent to Lyft or Uber and get a ride from the train station down to the dock. In fact, when we tried to pull that up, there were no cars available, and we searched multiple apps, and we were finding the same thing. It was a very busy day. There were multiple ships in port that day, and people were coming and going. So there were ships that were dropping off customers as well as new ships getting ready to leave. So because of that, all of the rideshare cars were occupied at that point in time, and so we were not able to find one. So we ended up walking with our luggage about two miles to get to our ship. Now None of that will impact my review of Princess Cruise or what happened there, with one exception, and we will hit that in just a little bit here. But what we wanna talk to you about is our cruise and our experience on the boat, and what we absolutely loved and what we did not like as much as some of the other cruises. We went, though, out of Southampton up to Norway. We went and saw four stops in the fjords of Norway, and it was absolutely beautiful. It was gorgeous. It was great scenery. The towns were very small that we went to. In fact, one town only had a couple hundred residents. They had no hospital, no police force. They said that there's no drugs or crime there, and that everybody knows everyone, and they get snowed in during the winter. So it was a very unique experience. We had a chance to try a lot of the foods in Norway. We had both reindeer and goat jerky. We had the brown cheese which they are famous for. We went actually on a culinary tour on one of our stops, and we had about a 10 to 12 different things that we had a chance to try some of which were really good, some of which were not so good and I would not try again. But all in all, it was a great experience to try a new culture, try some new foods, and learn a little bit more about Norway and see the beautiful sights up there. In fact, one of the fjords that we went down was the same fjord that the Disney animators went up and utilized when they made the movie Frozen. So they modeled Arendelle and the castle and all that off of places in Norway. And in fact, the castle's based off a place in Oslo, which we did not get to. But the fjord that they live on was a place that we did go to, and we were able to see that and compare what it looked like in the movie, in the cartoon to real life. So that was a really cool experience. We had a lot of fun. Like I said, we did a food excursion. We did a one city tour. And then twice, we went to glaciers. So we went to two different glaciers and had a chance to do a little hike to those. And it was quite different than what we had seen in Alaska. The hikes were beautiful. There were some amazing waterfalls. There was one hike in particular that was very touristy, meaning that there was a restaurant and a shop at the base, and then everyone walked the same paved path to the glacier. They had what they called troll cars that would take you up there if you couldn't walk. But that one was very busy and lots of people, especially from our ship, were at that glacier. So really cool to see nature up there and to see what Norway looked like. And then, of course, we flew back into New Orleans. I had an easy trip here. And coming back home you, despite the long flight you gain six hours during the flight, so it was only a few hours after we had left despite the long flight, and got back in and got right back to our lives here in New Orleans. So all in all, a really great trip. I will talk to you at the end about whether or not I would do this particular cruise again. But let's dive into Princess Cruise compared to other cruise lines. Now, keep in mind, like I said at the top of the episode we've reviewed Disney Cruise Line in the past, we've reviewed Carnival, and we've reviewed Holland America, and those are the three cruise lines that I'm gonna be comparing against Princess because this was our first time on Princess. We have not yet done Royal Caribbean or Norwegian. Those are ones that we would like to do in the future, and then potentially some others as well, but those are the two other real main ones that people from the US go on. So we're definitely gonna try to get on those cruises at some point in time. So let's start first with the accommodations. So we stayed in a balcony room which is what we've done on every single cruise so far. So that was very consistent. The room itself was very similar to any other room that we've been in. I will say that on Princess, the room was slightly larger meaning that though you still, had to kinda squeeze around to get through around the bed and the couch and stuff like that, it felt like it had a little bit more room than we have on Carnival or the other cruise lines. But all in all, the room was comfortable, and it was very consistent with what we've seen elsewhere. Some of the benefits are in this room, they did have a a screen or a curtain that you could pull between the couch side and the bedroom side so that way, like our daughter she sleeps always on… They did the fold-out couch, and she always sleeps there. She could have her own space. We could have our own space. We really liked that. That was a nice feature, and that's easy to add I would assume on most of these other cruise lines. So that was one really upside. I will say out of all of the rooms that we've been on between the four cruise lines this is probably second-best to Disney. Disney does one thing a lot better, and that is that it splits the bathroom, where you can have a sink and toilet separate from the showers area. So that way, two people can be utilizing a bathroom at the same time instead of only having a single bathroom. Princess Carnival, and Holland America all only have the single bathroom. So at least in the rooms that we've stayed in. And I do know that there's other levels you can get to that have a split bathroom, but for the traditional just standard balcony Disney is by far the best. Princess I'd put in second place. And then Holland America and Carnival are very close. I'd say tied for third there Now let's talk food. When we look at food we did a lot of our eating in the dining room as well as up on the Lido deck. We had a chance to go through the buffets, we had a chance to go through the main dining, and we did both the reserved dining, so we had a set time that we went to every single night and had the same waitstaff. And that's a nice experience because then they get to know you a little bit. That is very similar to Disney, very different from Carnival, and very different from Holland America when we went on Holland America we did have the dining room, but we didn't spend a lot of time in the dining room. We actually ate a lot at the buffet just because it was the two of us and we were running around the ship quite a bit. I can't really compare the dining room at Holland America to the others. But I will say having the set staff in the dining room was very nice. Now, we also did the walk-up dining room as well. That is very similar to what we've seen on every other cruise line, specifically Carnival 'cause we've done a lot of Carnival cruises. But it's very different than Disney, where Disney though you rotate through restaurants, you're gonna have the same crew every single night. And again, they get to know you very well. They know what drinks you like, and soda is included on Disney's, and so they're bringing you … i'll drink a Diet Coke at dinner. They'll bring that to you every single night r- before you even sit down often. I will say as far as the dining experience itself goes Disney, again, is the top-ranked. Number two, I actually will go with Carnival over Princess or Holland America. And that, it gets more specific into the food quality. The food quality on Holland America and Princess was just kinda blah. Not a lot of seasoning, not a lot of flair. It was all very general type foods that probably most people would eat, and you can definitely tell that they purposely did it that way. Carnival, you get a lot more variety. Specifically you get things like the BlueIguana up on the Lido deck, where you can get burritos and tacos anytime you want. You have the Guy's Burger Joint. That's really good. And then the Guy's Pig and Anchor the barbecue, which I, which is my favorite restaurant that I've ever been to on a cruise ship. I absolutely love going to the Pig and Anchor and getting my barbecue on a cruise ship on Carnival. As far as the food quality goes again, nothing will beat Disney. Disney's gonna be the top of that one. But Carnival's gonna be a close second, and then Princess and Holland America are down below those. Now let's talk entertainment. Ships' entertainment is every single night they usually have a show. Usually you have some comedians, magicians they do trivia, they do games, they do all kinds of different things throughout the cruise the entire time that you're gone. So we had a chance to participate in all of those like we normally do. We're actually very consistent on that where we go to the show every single night. We try to do trivia at least once a day, sometimes multiple times a day if we're at having a day at sea. We'll usually go to the art auctions. We'll usually go to the different events. Sometimes we do casino events and all that. But we're very used to the entertainment on these cruise ships because we participate in most of it. So I will say we were extremely disappointed on this cruise. The Princess Sky's entertainment was awful. The quality of the singers was very low. The quality of the shows was very low. In fact w- we unanimously agreed that out of the four cruise lines, this was by far the bottom. The Princess was the absolute worst that we've seen. And we've heard from other people, hey, the Holland America, the Carnival their shows are kinda generic, and that's true. They're usually like a musical review. They usually do some kind of singing every single night in their shows. But I will say that the quality of their shows was far superior to what we saw on Sky Princess. By far Princess is the bottom of the barrel when it came to the entertainment. Likewise, when we did all the trivia events, things like that we saw Just a, a wide variety of things from people cheating to having way huge crowds show up where they couldn't really accommodate everyone, where we don't really see that on the other cruise lines. So the entertainment value of Princess was much, much lower than the other cruise lines. Let's talk next embarkment and disembarkment, so getting on and off the ship. I will say i- Princess made that very easy. They have the medallions. The medallions are super convenient, super nice. In fact, what we loved is when you'd walk towards your room, your door would unlock before you get there because it knew you were coming because they're tracking you on the ship. I know some people don't love that aspect of being tracked, but I will say it definitely made it a lot more convenient, and especially when you went to the restaurants and stuff, they already knew who you were because they could track where your medallions were in relation to the people holding the iPads or whoever was gonna be helping you. So that was really cool. As far as getting on the ship, going through security and all that, very consistent with the other cruise lines. Very easy. I, I can say honestly across all cruise lines, getting on the ship is usually very consistent and not too difficult. Now, coming off the cruise ships. Coming off the cruise ships we've had a different experience almost every single time, meaning either something kinda goes a little bit goofy, or maybe something takes a little bit longer, or maybe there's some kinda delay, and I will say it's very consistent, if that makes sense. We've had times specifically one Carnival cruise that we went on, where it was delayed coming in, and so we were delayed getting off the ship, and everybody's sitting up on the Lido deck with all their carry-on luggage, trying to eat, trying to do stuff, waiting to get off the ship. That one was pure chaos. Outside of that, all of our other cruises have been very similar, where they're calling you off in your groups or your group number. Usually when you're coming off, there's some kinda line to get off because you have to scan out, and then you're gonna have to go through the customs and get your luggage all at the end. All of that experience is very consistent. So I will say if I had to give a ranking, Disney probably does it the best, and that's just because of how friendly they are and how they welcome you on the ship. Princess, I would put in second place, and Carnival and Holland America I would put tied for third. Not much difference there when it comes to the two of them. And the only thing that Princess gets an edge on is having the medallions Next, let's talk about app. So each of the cruise lines has an app. They're usually pretty easy to navigate. They have a lot of information. They're gonna tell you what's going on. So everything from ship schedule to different events you can go to the food and the menus and where to find them and locate them. I will say that the Princess app by far and I'm not exaggerating here, I'm saying extremely by a large amount, is the worst app we have ever seen in our entire life. I, I will tell you it just, it didn't help us at all. In fact, let's go back to our two-mile walk to the port from the rail station that we came off of. So when we got there we were looking online. Where do we go? What, what port is the cruise ship at? How do we get to that port? There is zero information, zero, on the app that tells you, "Here's where you need to go. Here's where you need to go check in." It doesn't tell you any of that. In fact, you can Google it. You can go to their website. You can log in there. It doesn't tell you anywhere there where to go or how to get there. In fact, the only way that we found where we needed to go was occasionally, if you guys have been on a cruise before, you know that people will start Facebook groups. So they will do the ship name, the date that the ship sails, the date that it leaves and where it's going, and they will create a Facebook group. So I joined that Facebook group, and on there, there were tons of people talking about, "We don't know where to go. Where do we go?" And all that people would say is it was at gate or terminal number four down there in Southampton. We Googled that. We tried to map to it, and it did get us mapped in the general vicinity, so it got us close. But when we walked up there, it wasn't easy to find. There was no clear gate number four. In fact, we kinda stood around for a few minutes and were looking, 'cause you could see the cruise ships, and we couldn't see the Sky Princess. We were looking in every direction. So as a matter of fact, we actually turned and walked the wrong direction just for a minute or two before we saw other people walking towards us. And we asked them "Which cruise- cruise line are you headed to?" And they said, "We're headed to the Sky Princess as well." And so we said, "Do you know where it is?" And they said, "We were just told,'Keep walking down this road until you get to the terminal gate number four, and then go up there, and that's where you'll find it.'" We walked with them, sure enough probably about a half mile further than what even Apple Maps told me to go. We found the gate number four. We walked in there, and then you had to walk almost an additional mile down that road to get to where the ship was. So it was a terrible experience trying to get there. The app didn't help us at all. The app did not provide any directions. It didn't have an address that you could pin or that you could pull up in any maps. It didn't have anything that you could tell a driver. So for example, if you took a, a Bolt there in England and said, "Hey, here's where we wanna go," you would have to hope that the Bolt driver is in the area, and they're familiar with the area, and they would know where Princess Cruise Lines goes out of and guess which gate you were at. So it was a very poor experience From there, once you're on the app it's not terrible to navigate, but it doesn't have a ton of information. So it, it was a lot more difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. So we were annoyed with this app. It didn't work very well. I will say, all in all, this is by far the worst app that we've seen. Disney has a very good app. I will even go a step further and say Carnival has a great app. So those are gonna be my top-ranked one. And then since it was so long ago that we went on Holland America, I can't even remember the app let alone if they even had one. You're talking about somewhere around 2010 that we went on that cruise. So again, I can't comment on Holland America compared to the others. But I can say in 2026, Princess has the worst app I've ever seen That brings me next to the value of the cruise, and is this something that I would do again and find value in? Now, I will say, and if you listen to our other episode, we definitely talked about this, that Disney by far is the most expensive cruise line. And it's not even close. They're usually double what some of the other cruises are, and in fact, sometimes they're triple what a Carnival Cruise could potentially be. On that episode we talked about is it worth the money to go on a Disney cruise? And though Disney wins in almost every single category, especially entertainment, especially food things like that, and the experience the question is it worth double or triple the price of the others? And typically I would tell you no. And that's because I like to pinch my pennies and I like to save. So I would tell you it's not worth doing a Disney cruise compared to the others. Now, if you have little kids and you want them to experience Disney Cruise and see all the characters,'cause you do get a lot of character opportunities, or go through the kids' clubs with the Disney cast members and stuff like that, then by all means, yes, please book a Disney cruise. You're gonna have a wonderful time. It's absolutely great. But for an adult or, we've got a 15-year-old right now would I wanna take her on a Disney cruise for that price when I can get something much less expensive that's very similar? Typically, no. So let's go back, though, to Princess. Is Princess worth the cost? I will tell you that the cost of the cruise for Princess is similar to Celebrity, and th- those are a little bit more expensive than typically your Carnival or your Norwegian. So they're kinda getting into the Royal C- Caribbean price range. They're between… if I were to tier them, I'd say Carnival's by far the least expensive usually followed by Norwegian, and then you kinda have this mid-tier which is Royal Caribbean, Princess, Celebrity Cruise Lines that are all right there in the middle, and then you jump a lot to go to Disney. So is it worth it? No. I would say from our experience Carnival was a better cruise and Carnival's less expensive than Princess. So we will not be going on another Princess cruise unless that is the only option available to us. Then we may consider it, depending on where we wanted to go and what that cruise looked like. But if I have the exact same cruise the similar stops leaving from the same port for the same time period, I'm probably gonna choose one of the other cruise lines, more specifically probably Carnival which has been our most successful cruise that we've done. So we've done more Carnival cruises than others just because we enjoy the experience and it's not bad. Now, we are going on a Carnival cruise this November with some friends, and they've never been on a Carnival cruise, and they have done most of the others. They were a little timid wanting to book a Carnival cruise because they have s- heard bad stories and they've seen, obviously, the TikTok videos and stuff like that of fights breaking out on the ships and all that. I can tell you in the handful of cruises we've done with them, we have never seen that. There is a little bit of a difference in clientele between these cruise lines, and I encourage you if that's something you wanna research, go online, and you can find out a little bit more, and I'm not gonna speak to that on this episode. But being that there's a little bit of a difference, I have researched it, and I can tell you that typically your seven-day or longer cruises on Carnival are very consistent with your other cruise lines. Now, most of the incidents that happen on Carnival, if you research those and watch them, typically happen on three to five-day-long cruises. So you're you're at that point, I think, getting a little bit of a different clientele coming on the ship. These are people that are spending less money. They're only going for three days. They don't really … They're not worried about going to a lot of ports. They're not worried about maybe getting kicked off the ship, and so you do get a little bit of a different experience on shorter cruises. Now, we've never been on any cruise less than seven days on any cruise line, so I can't speak to how consistent that may be across different cruise lines. But I can say all the research I've done, all the incidents on Carnival cruises typically happen on three or five-day cruises. So I encourage you if you wanna book a Carnival cruise, do a seven-day or longer, and it'll probably be just fine, just like any of these other cruise lines. Now, my final question that I had was, would I go to Norway again? Norway was absolutely beautiful, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I would tell people that. I would say, "If you are into globe-trotting and exploring the world, yes, you definitely wanna go to Norway. It's an incredible country to go to and an incredible country to visit." However, my call-out would be is if you wanna go to see the fjords, and you wanna go see glaciers, and you wanna go see kind of that Nordic type of c- of not just culture but that climate and that temperate zone, you know as in the mountainous ranges on the water, you're gonna be better off going to Alaska. We have done an Alaska cruise. We have done a cruise obviously now in Norway, and between the two, we unanimously preferred Alaska over Norway. The, the beauty was very similar between the two but the ability to get close to a glacier was way higher in Alaska, and that was really cool to see, as well as just some of the excursions we could do. Some of the stuff that we could do along the way was a lot more fun there. And then there's also something to be said about being stateside and being able to travel in ease of access, meaning most Alaskan cruises leave out of Seattle. So you can get to Washington and get up to Seattle very easy, and usually only in a couple hours' flight versus flying internationally to a foreign country, having to be on a long flight that costs a lot more money. So because that Alaska's a little bit more accessible, obviously gonna be cheaper for you, and then in the end, the look and the feel is very similar but we felt we got a little bit more out of the Alaskan cruise. So with that, we hope you have a great week as you're planning your next vacation. We hope that this is helpful for you when you're considering a cruise and a good review for you to understand what Princess offers compared to the other cruise lines. But we will talk to you guys next time. Bye-bye.